During the summer, much-anticipated JSRs achieved final release, including JSR 334, Small Enhancements to the Java Programming Language; JSR 336, Java SE 7 Release Contents; and the final maintenance releases of JSR 924, Java Virtual Machine Specification; and JSR 901, Java Language Specification. Their respective Oracle Spec Leads, Joe Darcy, Mark Reinhold, and Alex Buckley for the last two, were on hand at various JavaOne and JCP events to give talks and chat with people about their work.

The JavaOne session, “Lightning Talks: JSRs in Progress,” gave the early-morning audience of fifty attendees insights into the purpose and status of four other JSRs of great interest. As Spec Lead, Emmanuel Bernard of Red Hat spoke about JSR 349, Bean Validation 1.1, which standardizes constraint definition, declaration, and validation for the Java platform. The original “widely popular” JSR 303 has been implemented in both SE and EE environments, prompting demand for additional features. The Expert Group is still forming, and anyone can follow or contribute to the work through this page.

Another Spec Lead, Manik Surtani of Red Hat, described JSR 347, Data Grids for the Java Platform, which is also at the Expert Group Formation stage. JSR 347 builds on JSR 107, JCACHE - Java Temporary Caching API, “to make Java more developer-friendly” by adding an asynchronous non-blocking API, a grouping API to control co-location, and distributed code execution and map/reduce APIs. Manik expects the JSR to achieve final release by September 2012, in time for possible inclusion under the Java EE 8 umbrella. He encourages open participation in both JSR 107 on GitHub and Google Groups and JSR 347 on GitHub and Google Groups.

SE/EE EC member, Werner Keil, is also an Expert Group member of the JSR 331, Constraint Programming API. He gave an update on the JSR’s status. After having won the JCP community’s coveted “Most Innovative JSR of 2010" award last year, rapid progress has been made on the specification, which is now in Proposed Final Draft stage. More information and free downloads of the current specification, javadoc, and user manual are available at http://4c110.ucc.ie/cpstandards/index.php/en/standards/java/jsr-331.

One of the newest SE/EE EC members, London Java Community (LJC, London's official JUG), was represented by Martijn Verburg. He explained JSR 310, Date and Time, which started in 2007. The open source specification has gone through an Early Draft Review, persisted through some rough times, and most recently begun work on the final piece, the TCK. The target date of completion is early 2012. When a member of the audience pushed for an earlier date to coincide with a related release, Martijn replied firmly that the current schedule is reasonable, but the earlier target was impossible.

The community thrives on news of what’s next in the technological pipe, but the JSR that grabbed the lion’s share of attention was JSR 348, which redefines the JCP program itself.